Obstetrical and Gynecological Texts in Middle English

Obstetrical and Gynecological Texts in Middle English Monica H. Green Duke University IN 1970, Rossell Hope Robbins publi,h,d his ,,Juab!, survey of Middle English medical texts, in which he identified ten manuscripts containing material ofobstetric and/orgynecological content. 1 By 1981, in his preface to Beryl Rowland's Medieval Womans Guide to Health, he was referring to twenty different manuscripts that had been identified, though Rowland herself mentioned only a half dozen in her book.2 Rowland transcribed and translated the gynecological text in one of these manu­ scripts, London, British Library, Sloane 2463,3 and a year later M.-R. Hallaert transcribed the text in Yale Medical Library manuscript 47;4 in neither case was the text correctly identified or compared to its Latin sources. The texts in Sloane 2463 and Yale 47have fared better than the rest of the substantial corpus of Middle English gynecological and obstetrical writings, however, which remains to this day virtually unstudied.5 In the course ofmy research on the manuscript traditions ofseveral Latin 1 Rossell Hope Robbins, "Medical Manuscripts in Middle English," Speculum 45 (1970): 393-415, esp. pp. 395, 406, 410. 2 Beryl Rowland, Medieval Womans Guide to Health: The First English Gynecological Handbook (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1981), p. xii. In addition to MS Sloane 2463, the text she transcribed, Rowland (pp. 24-25, 41, 46-48) mentions MSS Sloane 5 and 249, Royal 18 A.VI, Royal College of Surgeons 129 a.i.5, and Additional 12195. 3 For important corrigenda to Rowland's translation, see the review by Linda Voigts and Jerry Stannard in Speculum 57 (1982): 422-26. 4 M.-R. Hallaert, ed., The "Sekenesse ofwymmen": A Middle English Treatise on Diseases in Women (Yale Medical Library, Ms. 47fols. 60r-71v), Scripta: Mediaeval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, vol. 8 (Brussels: Omirel, UFSAL, 1982). ']. B. Post examined MSS Bodley 178, Bodley 483, and Douce 37 for his study "Ages of Menarche and Menopause: Some Mediaeval Authorities," Population Studies 25 (1971): 8387 . Audrey Eccles cited from the gynecological texts in MSS Douce 37, Sloane 421A and 2463, and Additional 34111 in her article "The Early Use of English for Midwiferies, 1500-1700," NM 78 (1977): 377-85. Alexandra Barratt will be incorporating excerpts from some of these texts in her forthcoming anthology of Middle English writings by or attributed to women. 53 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER gynecological texts - including their fortunae in the European ver­ naculars- I have compiled a list of thirty different manuscripts containing eleven different obstetrical and gynecological texts or collections of recipes in Middle English.6 These numbers will undoubtedly continue to grow as work proceeds on The Index ofMiddle English Prose and the comprehen­ sive catalogue of scientific and medical texts in Middle English being compiled by Linda Ehrsam Voigts and Patricia Deery Kurtz. The intent of the following list, therefore, is to aid future studies by demonstrating the range of material available and by describing the texts more fully than has yet been done. Additionally, to give the reader a sense of the wealth of information these texts contain relating to medieval views of the female body, childbirth, and generation, I also include as an appendix an anno­ tated transcription of a short treatise from London, British Library, manu­ script Egerton 827. In the few notices that have appeared of the Middle English obstetrical and gynecological texts, considerable confusion has been engendered owing to a lack of information about the Latin writings upon which English trans­ lators drew. Thus both Hallaert and Rowland incorrectly identified their texts as an English translation of one of the few Latin gynecological texts with which they were familiar, the ensemble of twelfth-century treatises attributed to the healer Trota, or Trotula, of Salerno.7 The three Salernitan gynecological and cosmetic works were indeed the most popular and widely disseminated texts on women's medical concerns in medieval Europe,8 but they were by no means the only Latin source from 6 I havebeen greatly aided in this research by the series ofnotecards compiled by Dorothea Waley Singer, "Handlist ofWestern Scientific Manuscripts in Great Britain and Ireland Dating from Before the Sixteenth...